In the fall of 2019, CLOSURE will once again offer a forum for all facets of comics studies. From literary, cultural, media, social and image research to the sciences and beyond: the sixth edition of CLOSURE continues our ongoing search for the best and most innovative articles and reviews representing the state of the art in comics research. We welcome detailed close readings as much as comics theory and pioneering approaches to the medium — our open section comprises a diverse range of interdisciplinary studies of all things ›comic‹.

The Internet has been a source of fascination for many horror and dark fantasy films, from Pulse to Unfriended, but recently films such as Slender Man, TV shows such as Channel Zero, and stories such as Neil Gaiman’s “Ghosts in the Machines” have begun featuring characters and stories that don’t just take inspiration from online spaces, but actually trace their origins there.

Digital America is now accepting submissions for Issue No. 12. We are an online journal that focuses on digital art and culture with an eye towards impactful perspectives in the digital age, as well as deconstructing what it means to live in our current political climate. We are looking for critical essays, film, artwork, design, and reviews that question, analyze, and/or hack the tools of digital culture. We are also interested in work that explores how new behaviors and global networks of power and influence are examining what it means to be American.

Under the auspices of the Research Project “Orientation: Towards a Dynamic Understanding of Contemporary Fiction and Culture (1990s-2000s)” (ref. FFI2017-86417-P), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, this conference addresses past, present and future orientations of (neo-)Victorian literature and culture.

In an episode of a British TV series Black Mirror called “Crocodile,”set some time in a near future, memories, both human and nonhuman, become recordable and viewable on a simple, portable device. This unassuming gadget seals the future of the protagonist—a murderer—who, while eliminating all human witnesses to her crime, forgets the nonhuman witness, a guinea pig, whose memory the police is then able to view to promptly identify the suspect. In the 2017 Blade Runner, androids have childhood memories that they know to be fake, implanted by the manufacturer. In turn, cli fi and environmentalist writers inscribe elements, such as water, air, soil, or dust, as memory devices, creating nonhuman archives for posterity.